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The rebellion that almost killed Detroit will some day make it stronger

The uprising that became a rebellion that became one of the worst riots in history didn't begin with a man throwing a bottle or police shutting down a party at an unlicensed bar.

No, it began more than a century before, when escaped slaves making their way north to freedom wound up being re-enslaved in Detroit, leading to a race riot in 1833.

It continued when Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African-American physician, had to defend his home from a white mob in 1925. He was later acquitted, but his wife and daughter contracted tuberculosis (his wife believed it was while she was in jail). His 2-year-old died; his wife left him.

It continued when fighting between blacks and whites at Belle Isle escalated into a riot that spread across the city in 1943 and left 34 people dead, 25 of them black, and more than 400 injured. Most of the dead were killed by police.

Twenty-four years later, the city would erupt again in an uprising that left 43 dead, nearly 1,200 injured, more than 7,200 arrested and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed.

Police action in the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, wasn't the beginning; it was the latest in a long narrative of oppressive racism, discrimination, injustice and rampant police brutality that a growing city continued to ignore. But that is so much harder to explain than saying police raided a blind pig and a man threw a bottle.

Patsy Crouther was 16 years old and pregnant that fateful summer when smoke began rising from 12th Street and then across the city. But like most black kids and few white kids, she knew what was happening.

"People were tired everywhere," she said, speaking not of being fatigued but of being fed up.

The '67 uprising turned Detroit into a pockmarked reminder of decades of ignored complaints. But it gained a second legacy: It birthed new unlikely warriors, foot soldiers in a battle to be heard, in a battle for change, warriors like Patsy Elmore, now a mother of three. Ask her about the rebellion, about the night two boys who survived police killings at the Algiers Motel ran back to the neighborhood screaming "They killed Carl" and she will tell you about how, over the next months and years, she would become more and more involved in organized efforts to fight police brutality, dragging along her toddler son, Kenneth Coleman, now a city historian who charts the moments that have defined this city.

Dan Aldridge helped organize the people's tribunal after the killings at the Algiers Motel in Detroit in 1967.(Photo: Romain Blanquart, Detroit Free Press)

The story of the '67 rebellion is the story of people like Elmore — and V. Lonnie Peek and Dan Aldridge, who convened a mock trial for the three officers acquitted of killing Carl Cooper, Fred Temple and Auburey Pollard in a night of terror at the Algiers Motel, a horrific incident now the subject of a major film. And people like Sheila Cockrel, the daughter of Catholic community volunteers, who grew up in Corktown, joined the battle early and became a city councilwoman. Ask her how long the chasm between Detroit's black citizens and police, between black residents and equality and justice, has existed, and watch her point to a volume on a nearby bookshelf in her office that details black residents' complaints about police brutality dating to the 1920s.

This is a promotional photo Ken Cockrel Sr. and I (Sheila Cockrel) that was taken in early 1968 for an event where we were speaking the impact of the ’67 Rebellion and police in Detroit.(Photo: Family Photo)

Their stories — Elmore's, Peek's and Cockrel's — represent how regular people stood up to become activists. But the story also begs the question: Was '67 a cautionary tale and its 50-year commemoration a call for others to contend with continued discrimination? The remembrances and programs and major earth-shattering film all come as Detroit faces yet another incarnation of discrimination and unequal treatment. The city’s leadership — and its police department — now contend with real accusations that the city’s renaissance is really a for-whites-only movement and part of an effort to make Detroit a well-to-do, majority white city again, something it hasn’t been since 1980.

Today's Detroit is a product of racism, a city borne of disenfranchisement that continues today. Detroit has been trying to outrun it for 50 years. Will it rise above it or re-embrace it? It is hard to tell, some say, because Detroit is a city where residents seem to accept whatever comes.

"We are so conditioned to understand that these things happened to us and our lives are so worthless," said Juanita Moore, president of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, the largest in the U.S. outside of the national museum in Washington. She said racism and discrimination continued for so long, and continue today, because black people have continued to accept it.

"We don’t value ourselves enough ...," she said. "People see it, their hearts break but they swallow it and keep moving."

Gil Robertson, president of the African American Film Critics Association, who was in town for the world premiere of "Detroit," the film about police killings during the uprising, said Detroit is stuck in time.

"The key hallmark of a community is its ability to take care of itself," he said. "The black community (in Detroit) has never been in a position in this country, even during the tenure of the first black president, to get to a place where it is fully emancipated."

Activist Lonnie Peek talks about living in Detroit in 1967 at home in Detroit on July 14, 2017.(Photo: Romain Blanquart, Detroit Free Press)

There is no escaping what happened in ’67 — despite history books not teaching about it or most people not understanding the enormity of the brutality that led to it. But the legacy of the uprising isn't just the burned buildings or a party shut down. That carefully crafted tale, told for 50 years, is maintained because the tale of the hunt is always told by the hunter, not the lion.

The legacy is that of a 10-year-old boy who learned to fear police but grew up to become its current police chief. It is the activists who held a mock trial for the three officers acquitted of killing three young black men at the Algiers Motel, with Rosa Parks as the juror. It is the white former city councilwoman who, at 19, joined a movement to stop police mistreatment of black residents, including the man she loved and would marry and probably would have been mayor had he not died.

The complex myriad stories from the summer of '67 make clear that there isn't one collective thought about the disturbance. The emotions are as varied as the stories and include those of a grandfather who took up a shotgun and protected a white-owned corner drugstore against looters, not because he loved the owner, but because he feared the rioters would also burn down his three buildings next door. They include a young black, middle-class mother whose husband came home from work and couldn't leave for a week because the car wouldn't start. They spent the entire rebellion trapped in their home, afraid to go outside, horrified by the violence and praying for it to end.

The legacy of the unrest is that it changed people, empowered people, defined how they would live their lives, none more than Patsy Elmore, an unlikely activist who wanted a better life for her sons.

CLOSE

Patsy Elmore, 66 and Adrienne Montgomery, 65 recall what it was like growing up in Detroit just before the 1967 rebellion and riots.

Q: You were a 16-year-old who, because of events in Detroit, turned to activism. How did that happen?

A: Two years after the rebellion, I started getting politically active. It was the Boyd, Brown and Bethune situation that did it.

(Hayward Brown, John Boyd and Mark Bethune were involved in a shootout with Detroit police officers from the controversial STRESS(Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) unit. Four officers were wounded, according to news reports. Boyd was killed in a shootout Feb. 23, 1973. Bethune allegedly killed himself four days later. On Jan. 12, 1974, Brown, then 18, was arrested after the firebombing of a federally financed birth control clinic near Wayne State University. He had been tried and acquitted five times on charges related to the police shootings. He was convicted of the firebombing and sentenced to prison. An appeals court overturned the conviction. He became a political folk hero to some Detroiters, reports said.)

I was watching the news and listening to the radio and heard the story and I just stood up and I remember what happened with Carl and Aubrey and my whole body said, 'Nah, this isn’t right.' ... and I decided that I wanted to get involved. I found the Labor Defense Coalition with Ken Cockrel. ... I started going to meetings and I would take Ken with me.

(Her son, Kenneth Coleman, says he grew up hearing his parents talk about the rebellion.) "Life was suspended," he said. "Most parents prohibited the kids from going away from the block. In my case, it was from the front porch.

My father was very angry about that. He grew up in Carthage, Miss., and worked at Chevrolet Gear and Axle. He said 'You can't change things. You’re going to go down there and get in trouble.' I can remember working on voter registration, canvassing neighborhoods and really trying to fire up black residents … who just didn't read as much back then. We were trying to educate and let our people know, 'hey, you need to get out and vote and maybe we won’t have any incidents like this. The police feel like they can come in our neighborhoods and do things like this because we don’t get together and fight.' I wanted to help. I wanted to try to educate our people and didn’t want to see young black men just get destroyed like that because of knowing what happened with Carl and being so close to that incident."

Elmore said the irony of her becoming an activist was that she never saw the rebellion that began down the street from her firsthand.

"All we saw was on television. We saw the tanks. We saw smoke. But the pictures now that I can pull up on the Internet, people running around in the street, we didn’t see any of that. She also remembers losing her friends, not forever, but for then.

Q: How did becoming an activist change your life?

A: I was the only activist in our circle, and I was a little black sheep because of it. We were taught by our parents that you just kept your mouth shut. If you want to get by, keep your mouth shut. My dad and I would go back and forth. … The police are gonna come down on you. … No daddy, we're going to stick together, the white kids and the black kids and together we’re going to turn this around.

She and her friends say they were raised in a village, one friend, Adrienne Montgomery, said "would have been a sociologist's dream to study — except for the police brutality.

Q: What was life like?

A: We went to Northwestern High School to swim. We lived right near the Riviera movie theater. We would go there and watch movies and two blocks away from that was the Grande Ballroom. That was an interesting place because at the time, it served a two-tier purpose, and it was also black and white.

We would go and see some of the acts that were more catered to the blacks and then sometimes it would be rock, and the white children would come. Separate nights. That’s just the way it worked. ... That same venue was sometimes a roller skating rink. Those were our activities right in our neighborhood … dances at the Palladium. We played hopscotch. We would literally dance in the street — Martha and the Vandellas had that record. Remember when Winnie Parham would get the shing-a-ling line going and we’d be coming out of the backyard all the way across the street? We had a good time.

Everybody knew everybody. We’d run in and out of each other’s homes. But when we would venture out, we might have a little problem. You just knew. The police presence at that time ... we knew our place, and if you crossed the line, you might get into trouble. We would go to Edgewater, that was a venue that we loved because it was an amusement park. We used to catch the bus from Grand River and Joy Road. ... We’d have big fun! The trouble might come if some kids might get to arguing in the park. But the danger would be when we’d walk back to get the bus. That’s when you had to watch what you said as you’d try to get home. Going to Edgewater, you were going to have big fun, but getting back home was the price you had to pay.

Elmore's friend, Adrienne Montgomery, said she only felt safe in a black neighborhood.

A: If it wasn’t an all-black area, then they didn’t want you there. ... I was snatched up by police in front of my house. I was with two other girls. We were playing. I was about 10 years old and my mother said to me, "I’m going to lay down. If you leave, let me know so I can lock the door." A police officer comes from the alley across the street, grabs me and one of the other girls and drags us through the alley. I said, "I can’t go. I have to tell my mother." He said you don’t have to tell your mother nothing, and dragged us to the next street. They accused us of stealing a car. We couldn’t even reach the pedals but we apparently stole a car.
She said her mother arrived at the station, and after an interrogation, they were let go — without apology.

"So those were types of things we knew could happen," Patsy Elmore said.
That's how things like the Algiers Motel incident happened, an incident that turned a teacher and social worker into an activist.

Seventy-five-year old Lonnie Peek, a minister, management consultant company owner and radio host arrived in Detroit in 1965 with none of those things on his agenda. In June 1967, after teaching at Northwestern High, he had just decided to enroll at Wayne State to get a master's degree in social work. He spent most days that summer hanging with his family, taking the kids downtown, walking along 12th Street, a hub of activity and going to church.

But then the rebellion came.

Peek: We'd go down on 12th Street, the excitement, shops, stores, barbecuing, music. It was very festive. It was an African-American cultural place. ... Having fun. pickled pig feet, barbecued ribs, a place you went to just to chill and have fun and relax.

Q: When did you know something had happened on July 23?

A: The first thing I heard was my aunt Ollie called about 11 o'clock — we didn't go to church that Sunday — and she said something’s happening on 12th Street, down at 12th and Clairmount. You need to see and call me back and let me know. My brother-in-law across the street, Chuck Russell, we got in the car and went down there. The looting had begun. It hadn’t reached a point where you were scared. We got there about 12 o'clock and we stayed a couple, three hours. We saw this was not something that was going to end in a few minutes. ... We’d walk up and then come back then retrace our steps.

The car was always a safe haven. We said, "Hey man, what's going on?"

"Man, what the police did."

"So how come ya’ll breaking into stores?"

"Because you know they’ve been treating us wrong, and we feel this is ours right now."

"Aren’t some of these stores owned by black folks?"

"Yeah, we think so."

The mob mentality had taken over and the crowd had started getting younger with more teenagers participating. ... By the third or the fourth night… we heard that some brothers had been killed at the Algiers Motel. … I can’t remember how Dan (Aldridge) and I got hooked up… in all likelihood, he came by the house.

CLOSE

Activist Dan Aldridge talks about what life was like in Detroit before the 1967 civil unrest.

We decided in our infinite wisdom that we were going to go to the Algiers and see for ourselves what happened. Whatever rumors we heard were true. Like yesterday, I could see blood on the wall, the disarray of the furniture. That’s when the magnitude of one of ... the rebellion started to take place. Dan and I, we said, we need to do something about this. We did talk to the families of the young men who were killed. We recalled this event in Sweden called the people’s tribunal. So then we said, why don’t we do something to inform the community about what happened … and try the police officers because we know they’re not going to get charged on this because the police don’t get charged doing stuff like this."

CLOSE

Activist Dan Aldridge talks about a phone call he received from congressman John Conyers during the 1967 civil unrest.

Peek and Aldridge convened that tribunal, a people's court with Ken Cockrel as judge and a jury that included Rosa Parks, Grace Boggs and Ed Vaughn, to try the three officers — Ronald August, Robert Paille and David Senak — who were acquitted of killing Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard and Fred Temple.

CLOSE

Activist Dan Aldridge, Lonnie Peek and Dorothy Dewberry Aldridge talk about the people's tribunal after the Algiers Motel killings in Detroit in 1967.

They set up a courtroom at the Shrine of the Black Madonna complete with photos of the officers and the victims.

"Some people didn’t want to do it," Peek said in an interview, fearful of retribution.

"It was hot. We got to the church. People were in the streets, couldn't get in."

The officers were convicted. No one will ever know whether that eased any pain or tamped down another uprising.

And no one knows whether Detroit is close to another one.

But ask Sheila Cockrel, the former city council member, who grew up in Corktown, who is the widow of one of Detroit's strongest anti-police brutality advocates and is a keeper of the battle flame, how long brutality and discrimination have been problems, and she points to a book on a shelf in her Corktown office. It details black residents' complaints against police since the 1920s.

"I think it's important to note that conditions for poor black people in Detroit today are worse than they were in 1967," she said. "The number of people in poverty, the access to jobs. There appears to be a much greater level of recognition of the importance of centrality of opportunity for good jobs in today's political and civic leadership than in '67, the efforts to reinvent workforce development ... we certainly have a different police dynamic today than we did in '67. But no one should think for a moment that the city should rest on the idea that we haven't had a shooting like the horrific one in Ferguson.

"The experience I have with young black men who are students at Wayne State is in many cases is this: The language they hear from police officers in the neighborhood is eerily similar to the language from the 1950s, "This is my corner! Get off my corner!" when someone is walking home after getting off a bus and it should be an indicator that we need to make sure there's more fundamental change in the relationship between the police department and young men than we can see today."

Where Detroit is concerned, there is no rest for the weary, and no way we can continue to talk about the city's race problems on anniversaries and during commemorations.

Hopefully, this commemoration of tragedy and long-standing discrimination will lead to the long overdue conversation we should have been having all along.